3D Blu-ray Player Prices Down 26% Since April

PriceSCAN.com's 3D Blu-ray Player Index fell 10.6% last week.

The average price for a 3D Blu-ray player has fallen 26 percent since April 2010 - 10.6 percent in the last week - when the category was first tracked, according to PriceSCAN.

PriceSCAN, a research company, doesn’t report the average price, but instead converts the wide range of Blu-ray players on the market into a single proprietary scale that represents the entire category.

“Despite sporadic periods of price support, PriceSCAN’s 3D Blu-ray Player Index has now fallen some 26 percent since it’s inception in mid-April of this year,” says Jeff Trester, PriceSCAN co-CEO and chief economist. “The recent acceleration in the pace of discounting speaks to the continued difficulty retailers seem to be having finding a price level at which they can drive sustained sales volume for this still relatively new technology. These price cuts are all the more significant coming as they do ahead of the holiday shopping season.”

The report throws a bit of a wet blanket on integrators’ visions that 3D was going revive pricing on video products. For example, PriceSCAN says the price of the Sony BDP-S570 has fallen from $250 to $170 since late February.